Double V, Double-Time: Bebop's Politics of Style

Author(s): Eric Lott

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Callaloo, No. 36 (Summer, 1988), pp. 597-605
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2931544 .
Accessed: 27/08/2012 12:05
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
.
The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Callaloo.
http://www.jstor.org
DOUBLE V, DOUBLE-TIME:
BEBOP'S POLITICS OF STYLE
By Eric Lott
The song and the people is the same.
-Amiri Baraka
Almost fifty years on, the story of how the crash crew made a revolution at Minton's
Playhouse is so worn that we forget how disruptive bebop actually was. As Amiri
Baraka quipped, the story sounds comfortably like that of the Lost Generation of
Americans in Paris, all formal experimentation and narcotic junketeering.1 But jazz
modernism was rooted Stateside, in the roiling New York of the 1940s; indeed it is
impossible to absorb the bop attack without its social reference, as it is difficult to
understand New York at that time without consulting the music. Bebop has been
claimed by other, mostly unhistorical narratives rather than articulated to its own so-
cial history. White-Negro revisionists Kerouac and Mailer to the contrary, bebop was
no screaming surge of existential abandon, its makers far from lost. And while bebop
said there was a riot going on, it was hardly protest music. Nor was it simply a series
of formal innovations, though as Albert Murray wrote, the musicians' chief desire was
to make the music swing harder.2 Bebop was about making disciplined imagination
alive and answerable to the social change of its time. "Ko Ko," Charlie Parker's first
recorded masterpiece, suggested that jazz was a struggle which pitted mind against
the perversity of circumstance, and that in this struggle, blinding virtuosity was the
best weapon.
Since the self-conscious advances of bebop so obviously announce themselves,
many writers ignore how much those advances belong to a moment, the early forties,
in which unpaid historical bills were falling due. Early in 1941, nearly ten thousand
black Ford workers threw their weight behind the UAW on a strike that forced Ford
to unionize; wages seemed to be on the rise. Later that year, defense plants were finally
desegregated under pressure from A. Phillip Randolph. Millions of women entered
the war-time labor force, with some gains in the form of wages and independence.
Black and white together routinely crowded the Track (Harlem's Savoy Ballroom)
those nights when nervous police hadn't temporarily closed it down. The ranks of the
NAACP grew, and in 1943 the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was founded. In
a still-segregated U.S. army, there were eight times as many black commissioned of-
ficers as there had been in World War I, and though many in Harlem wanted little or
nothing to do with what they considered someone else's war, those who fought did
so in the name of the "Double V" -victory abroad and victory at home. The activism
and engagement of this period, writes historian Jacqueline Jones, presaged the "Civil
597
CALLALOO-
Rights Revolution." Partly a result of this atmosphere, riots woke up L.A., Detroit,
New York, and other cities, politicians like New York's Mayor LaGuardia denouncing
such "juvenile delinquency." Push was coming to shove, and folk were willing.3
It is amidst all this that a group of young migrants from the South and Midwest
were beginning to refurbish the language of riff and accent at Minton's and at Clark
Monroe's Uptown House in Harlem. The psychological shift they glossed owed
largely to another round of black northward movement, a rising threshold of expec-
tation on the part of a generation whose demands refused to be tamed. Such shifts
are difficult to pinpoint, but this one came into desperate focus. On August 1, 1943,
Harlem exploded-word was a white cop had shot and killed a black soldier in a scuffle
involving a black woman. This was only mostly true (the soldier lived) but in the
ensuing uprising Harlem's colonialist face got lifted: the youth-wants-to-know flank
of the Double V went to work. The inequity of a black military man gunned down by
the white Uncle he'd protected overseas hit hard, and Harlem hit back, looting busi-
nesses and trashing cars to the tune of several millions. James Baldwin later said that
Harlem had needed something to smash.4
The connection between such deeply intended if wasteful militancy and the new
youth styles growing up around a radical new music was lost on no one at the time.
This was, people said, another "zoot suit riot." The establishment press in several
cities had whipped up a certain hysteria about zooted "gangsters" and "muggers";
white servicemen and some civilians began responding with mob attacks on anyone
approaching the color of sharkskin. Despite official denials, these were racial attacks
tout court. The character of the Harlem riot was racial as well, but its aggressive and
hugely collective response was of another order. A zoot-suited participant later de-
clared the zootish disposition to be at odds with the desire to fight a white America's
war when conditions at home were the problem: "By the time you read this I will be
fighting for Uncle Sam, the bitches, and I do not like it worth a damn. I'm not a spy
or a saboteur, but I don't like goin' over there fightin' for the white man-so be it."
Psychologist Kenneth Clark termed the new militancy "The Zoot Effect in Personal-
ity," but his early attempt to read a subculture proved only that liberal psychologists
were as defensive as the new style was dangerous.5 To stiff-arm the alleged provoc-
ateurs-zoots were also in open defiance of the War Production Board's rationing of
clothing, a visible sign of anti-patriotism-the L.A. City Council even debated de-
claring zoot suits illegal.6
But that didn't stop such styles of radical will from flourishing. Zoot-suiters grew
in the mid-1940s into hipsters. Encouraged by the ostentatious usages of some bebop
originators, black and white working-class bohemia made attitude and appetite signify
opposition to routine inequity, and routine generally. Deep-frozen on junk, they
adopted the effrontery displayed by some musicians on the bandstand. And their
jargon, itself a kind of improvisation, bucked the regulations of accepted articulate-
ness. These were self-styled ghetto intellectuals, stifled in the kind of ambition that
only the musicians were able to fulfill.7 Time magazine, like most, saw it from the other
side: bebop people, it said, "like to wear berets, goatees and green-tinted horn-rimmed
glasses, and talk about their 'interesting new sounds,'
" while their "rapid-fire, scat-
tershot talk has about the same pace-and content-as their music."8 L.A. station
598
__ _ _ _ _ _CALLALOO
KMPC banned the music in 1946; and it's no wonder that when relative old-timer Louis
Armstrong went to Paris in 1948 he was given police protection for fear of bebop dev-
otees and their volatile habits.
All of this does merit the spin of subculture theory: zoot, lip, smack, and double-
time became the stylistic answer to social contradictions (having mainly to do with
generational difference and migration) experienced by the makers and followers of
bop.9 Further, we need to restore the political edge to a music that has been so ab-
sorbed into the contemporary jazz language that it seems as safe as much of the current
scene-the spate of jazz reissues, the deluge of "standards" records, Bud Powell on
CD-certainly an unfortunate historical irony. For in the mid-forties, Parker, Dizzy
Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and the rest were tearing it up with such speed and ir-
reverence-sometimes so acrobatic as to feel unfinished, often world-historical-that
pre-war life seemed like a long, long time ago. In hindsight there may appear to be
other more radical breaks with jazz's past, but to an America fed on Bing and "Marezy
Doats" bebop was the war come home. Listen to the fury as Parker roars into "Bird
Gets the Worm," or to the way he and Fats Navarro suddenly transpose the head of
"Move" to minor on One Night in Birdland, or even to Monk's derangement of "April
in Paris," and it's clear why white music writers trying to preserve a sense of profes-
sional balance resorted to the plum tones of "this is the sort of bad taste and ill-advised
fanaticism that has thrown innumerable impressionable young musicians out of
stride."10 Brilliantly outside, bebop was intimately if indirectly related to the militancy
of its moment. Militancy and music were undergirded by the same social facts; the
music attempted to resolve at the level of style what the militancy combatted in the
streets. If bebop didn't offer a call to arms, as one writer has said in another context,
it at least acknowledged that the call had been made.11 How it translated that ac-
knowledgement into style is the subject of this essay.
New York in this period had an incalculable effect on jazz modernism's big push.
Harlem was a magic place, a refuge that lent young musicians, triply alien-migrant,
Negro, occupationally suspect-the courage to conquer. Since among the major in-
novators only Max Roach and Thelonious Monk were from New York, Harlem offered
a rediscovered community of things they had left behind: feasts, talk, home.12 The
phrase of moment may have been "Harlem is nowhere," but for the musicians it was
the logical place in which to coherently combine the various regional styles they had
brought with them. Here the Kansas City four/four found popular song forms and
Art Tatum's harmonic ideas, all of it grounded by the blues (skeptics are directed to
"Parker's Mood"). "I think the music of today," said Parker, "is a sort of combination
of the midwestern beat and the fast New York tempos," another way of saying that
it incorporated formally the migratory impulse.13
Ralph Ellison, who like many of the musicians came from the Southwest, remem-
bers turn-of-the-forties New York as a place which itself required improvisation, hon-
ing the wits of newcomers to quickness. Beyond "Harlem's brier patch" there seemed
to be "no agreed-upon rules of conduct," no sense of the limits the South imposed in
the "signs and symbols that marked the dividing lines of racial segregation."114 So
599
CALLALOO
homegirl and wonderboy had to make it up as they went along, acquainting them-
selves intimately with uncertainty the way they did standing up at stop-time and blow-
ing their four bars. Out of encounters in the streets of New York came local versions
of the wisdom and agility required of all fleet-footed inventors. "Coolness helped to
keep our values warm," says Ellison, "and racial hostility stoked our fires of inspira-
tion" (167). Not even the North could abide the kinds of interracial freedom the mu-
sicians cultivated; a palpable dissidence kicks the best of the music.
The shock of relocation was "handled" by the common language musicians devel-
oped-styles of dress, music, drugs, and speech homologous with the structures of
their experience. The requisite cool of the northern city dweller was unattainable un-
less negotiated through style. Malcolm X reports that his transition from Michigan
"country" to hip Bostonian was achieved primarily through a new zoot;15 South Car-
olinian Dizzy Gillespie's window-panes, cigarette-holder, goatee, and beret signified
on fancy city dress. The hip code sometimes appeared compensatory rather than
avant, insecure rather than assured, but it expressed real defiance. Like when Gillespie
put together a big band in 1945 which later found it had been booked to tour the Jim
Crow South. By the time the band got below the Mason Dixon line so many players
had quit it was virtually a new line-up (Feather 34). Through secrecy, exaggeration,
and wit, self-images were formed, alliances made, strategies of differentiation con-
cocted. Bop style, a kind of "fifth column fashion," was where social responsiveness
became individual expression, where the pleasures of shared identity met an intol-
erance for racist jive (Cosgrove 85-86).
At its hippest (and meanest), such a common language became a closed herme-
neutic that had the undeniable effect of alienating the riff-raff and expressing a sense
of felt isolation, all the while affirming a collective purpose -even at the expense of
other musicians. At Minton's, Gillespie would work out a complicated sequence of
chords and make sure insiders had it, then call the relatively simple "I Got Rhythm"
to cut the uninitiated on the bandstand. The unhip, says bassist Milt Hinton, were
"left right at the post ... eventually they would put their horns away."16 On different
occasions, though they knew well to the contrary, the boppers declared they weren't
in the tradition; no "respectable" classicism here. Older musicians were quite plausibly
put off. Johnny Hodges told trumpeter Howard McGhee, "[Bird] don't play nothing,"
and only later got wise (Giddins 67). Drummer Davey Tough recalled his first en-
counter with bop: "These cats snatched up their horns and blew crazy stuff. One
would stop all of a sudden and another would start for no reason at all. We never
could tell when a solo was supposed to begin or end."17 Louis Armstrong never really
made peace with bebop, "that modern malice" (Stearns 219); more than once Gillespie
unfairly dismissed Papa Dip for tomming. (Gillespie was also thrown out of Cab Cal-
loway's band for throwing spitballs at him onstage.) Attitudes like this allowed mu-
sical youth to make their condition as outsiders meaningful, and whether they in-
tended it to be or not, it was scarifying to musicians and audiences alike.
The various elements of bebop style were thus part of a new generational respon-
siveness to the northern city, particularly 1940s New York, a place distinguished less
by its capacity to shock than by its ability to make very little seem shocking.
18
What
evolved in turn was an aesthetic of speed and displacement-ostentatious virtuosity
600
CALLALOO _ _ _
dedicated to reorienting perception even as it rocked the house. Every instrument
became immediately more mobile, everything moved. Drummers Kenny Clarke and
Max Roach no longer thumped the bass drum four beats per bar, substituting instead
the live, shimmering pulse of ride and hi-hat cymbal. Bassists like Oscar Pettiford no
longer simply walked time, they provided melodic counterpoint to the soloists. Bud
Powell, Duke Jordan, and other pianists discarded the full-bodied approximation of
an orchestra for a series of jagged chords and horn-like, linear solos (Giddins 68,
Stearns 229-36). And the cold, vibratoless edge of Parker's tone, his and Gillespie's
high intervallic leaps, their penchant for going double-time at a moment's notice, the
breathtaking audaciousness with which they cut up their phrases, dissolved the spe-
cious equation of artistic intelligence with respectable European culture. These orig-
inally comprised the elements of what Baraka called the "willfully harsh, anti-assimi-
lationist sound of bebop," which at once reclaimed jazz from its brief cooptation by
white "swing" bandleaders like the aptly named Paul Whiteman and made any future
dilution that much harder (Jones 181).
In this way bebop redefined the tradition, indeed made it possible to keep playing
jazz in the face of given musical and social facts without losing self-respect. The sheer
velocity of much of the music, ignited by Roach's bombs, shifted the center of gravity
from grounded bass to mercurial rhythms echoed from drums to horns; base and
superstructure were to a certain extent collapsed. Add the pursuit of the non sequitur
to such speeds and such mobility, as in the bridge of Bird's solo on "Klaunstance" (on
The Savoy Recordings) where disconnected phrases dive at each other until the whole
is "resolved" into an arpeggiated drop, and the result is some blues that gleefully
critique tradition. So too does Monk's self-portrait/self-parody "Thelonious" (on Ge-
nius of Modern Music, Vol. I), its one-note head riding a lilting harmonic cycle, recalling
certain vocal arrangements of Ellington's "It Don't Mean a Thing" while anticipating
Randy Weston's "High Fly." It riffs self-consciously on tradition-Monk suddenly
erupting into stride piano-and depends for its effect upon a cool surface continually
broken up by jarring piano, the shock of the new. Gillespie once relevantly joked that
if it doesn't hurt your ears it isn't dissonance. For me, this new attitude is captured
best on a live recording of Harold Arlen's "This Time the Dream's On Me" (on One
Night in Birdland): Bird and drummer Art Blakey trading fours, Blakey stages two trip-
let figures, one on bass and one on snare, one a half-beat behind the other. The result
is an asymmetrical raucousness that seems to arrest the time as sure as it states its
commitment to a caustic groove. Instances of this kind of roughhousing are number-
less.
The widespread practice of appropriating the chord changes of popular tunes was
another means by which to achieve a similar result-as in Tadd Dameron's "Hot
House," a re-riffing of Cole Porter's "What Is This Thing Called Love" that lent itself
even to Eric Dolphy's out-to-lunch sermonizing fifteen years later. Essentially an old
blues impulse, writing new melodies for Broadway tunes was nevertheless an inter-
vention into the dominant popular culture of the period-in tunes such as "Hot
House" a kind of ritual dismemberment. (Those like David Toop who see similar strat-
egies in rap music are not far from the mark. 19) Whatever its effect, this was probably
not one of the distancing techniques so often ascribed to bebop, but rather a search
601
__________LC LLALOO
for harmonic variety and simultaneously a pointed participation in the popular. Char-
lie Parker, who later flirted with what Martin Williams calls the "spurious challenge"
of string formats,20 once told an admirer that to understand his music one should listen
to the Clovers (Giddins 104); and the course of postwar black music is arguably con-
stituted by the twin refurbishments of bebop and R&B colliding and diverging in mu-
tually enriching ways.21 Part of bop's force inhered in this involvement in and struggle
over the popular.
Bebop, in other words, was one of the great modernisms. Its relationship to earlier
styles was one of calculated hostility. It was a soloist's music, despite the democratic
ethos of jazz (in which soloists assume a momentary universality in a highly mutual
context), and particularly of bop (its dependence on unison riffs, the extreme sym-
pathy required between players to negotiate the rhythms). Its incorporation of ele-
ments of the popular (Bird was fond of quoting the "Woody Woodpecker" theme)
reminds one of Joyce or Mahler. Its commitment to exploratory rigor amounted to a
harshness that many took for ugliness. And its mocking defiance made a virtue of
isolation. Moreover, the social position of this modernism-distanced from both the
black middle class and the white consensus-gave aesthetic self-assertion political
force and value.
Gary Giddins says in his recent biography of Bird that the chief motive for all this
was not to offend but to pioneer, and that by the self-assertion of genius. I would
suggest that bebop's context made the two pretty much inseparable; socio-political
insistence was so available as both source and effect that even a self-consciously arty
music could call on it quite effortlessly. This, together with the 1942-44 recording ban
that made bebop's inception seem quite sudden, must explain the intensity of reaction
with which the music was first greeted. The small group format, for example, was
reinstitutionalized in part because the music demanded turns-on-a-dime and ex-
tended solo space; audiences experienced this as assault. Style wars aren't known for
taking any prisoners, and critics of the new music were as ruthless as the musicians.
Monk's "Thelonious," said Down Beat, sounded like the pianist had his mind on "the
stock returns or the 7th at Pimlico-anything but his piano."22 The farther this mod-
ernism extended the resources of Afro-American expressive culture, the greater
lengths culture critics would go to miss the point, though (or because, as Baraka om-
inously suggests) they began to recognize jazz's status as art.
Bebop could not in fact be heard without the alarm registering its birth; if we are to
understand its radical implications we must attend to this alarm. "It was as if," says
Martin Williams, "this bop style had swept away almost everything that had gone
before it, no matter how well or how badly the writers knew and understood what
had gone before it."23 To many, the music read as "atonal futuristic material produced
by the progressive modernists," to quote one of the baffled-so much a departure, as
this comment indicates, that there was hardly an available language to describe it.24
It certainly didn't fit into any of the "discursive categories" Down Beat used for its
record reviews-Hot Jazz (of an earlier kind), Swing, Dance, Vocal, and Novelty-
and there is an interesting bewilderment, early on, about where bebop should go. The
music generally precipitated an evaluative crisis among the cognoscenti, who re-
sponded as though to a breach in the social order. (A notable exception was Leonard
602
__ CALLALOO
Feather's mid-forties work in Esquire and Metronome.) By mid-1947 polemics raged in
Down Beat over which was the "real jazz," bebop or dixieland (a recent reactionary
reinvention) and well-known critics battered each others' sectarianism (Leonard
Feather vs. Rudi Blesh, Charles Delaunay vs. Hughes Panassie, Metronome vs. early
Record Changer).
Bebop's fearsomeness to its contemporaries is suggested not only by the vehemence
of the debate, the straining quality of the polemics, but also by the language of politics,
so often called upon to describe, dismiss, or even mock the music and its rivals. Lionel
Hampton, not a musician we tend to associate with either musical or political radi-
calism, said of his music in 1946: "Whenever I see any injustice or any unfair action
against my own race or any other minority groups 'Hey Ba Ba Rebop' stimulates the
desire to destroy such prejudice and discrimination." The writer interviewing Hamp-
ton on this occasion responded with nervous irony to "Hampton's class struggle" and
distanced himself from jazz's claim to "social significance" with a derisive "Marxian"
interpretation of "Caldonia."25 Dave Tough, an older bebop convert, in another in-
stance called dixieland a "Straight-Republican-Ticket kind of music" in some public
mudslinging with old-timer Eddie Condon.26 As a consequence of this kind of talk,
much of the forties music press, per Frank Kofsky, figured as law and order trying to
stem the furious tide.27
Yet in the postwar cultural formation beboppers were a black intelligentsia-the
other New York intellectuals-with only passing relation to a myopic left. Partisan
Review's commitment to modernism didn't extend to black music; its "Music Chron-
icle" columns were invariably about opera, at best Hindemith. (There was a splenetic
dismissal of bop by Weldon Kees in its brief "Variety" section, indicative of the music's
offensiveness to outsiders as well as intellectual blindness.28) Even Harlem Commu-
*nist Party intellectuals had an unsteady enthusiasm for contemporary music still in
touch with black cultural roots. Given the huge undertow of protest aesthetic in which
the best-intentioned of them had to wade, irreverent black genius was washed aside.
Just as the CP had dismissed the "Double V" because Hitler not Jim Crow was the
"real enemy," and called with LaGuardia for law and order after the Harlem uprising,
so they distanced themselves from the rowdiness of bebop, music far beyond the
reaches of the CP aesthetic.29 While the music generated a following, Beat writers like
Kerouac and Ginsberg were the closest bebop came to having visible oppositional
champions, a partisanship distorted by the projections of renegade romance.30
As it turned out, this was perhaps the only art, with the possible exception of certain
painting, that proved fully equal to the moment. In their way the bebop innovators
mapped the time as intelligently as writers like C. L. R. James and George Breitman
did in their political commentary. The latter knew the Harlem explosion was no mere
hooliganism, and defended something so seemingly irrelevant as the zoot suit when
wearing one threatened to become a misdemeanor in L.A. They realized style could
be dangerous; and in forcing the connection between Double V and double-time, the
people who made music like "Scrapple from the Apple" knew that too. This is, in the
end, the importance of the cult of smack and the sixteenth note, of the cocked beret
and the hip code: a politics of style beyond protest, focusing the struggles of its mo-
ment in a live and irreverent art.
603
CALLALOO
Notes
1. LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: Morrow Quill, 1963), 198. Many
thanks to Susan Fraiman, RJ Smith, and Peter Watrous for their suggestions on this essay.
2. Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 166.
3. For discussions of this political moment see Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait,
1900-1950 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1982), 290-346; Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor
of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family, From Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books,
1985), 232-56; Harvard Sitkoff, "Racial Militancy and Interracial Violence in the Second World
War," Journal of American History 58 (1971): 661-81; Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
(New York: Morrow, 1967), passim; Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (New
York: Grove Press, 1983), 193-320; C. L. R. James, George Breitman, et al., Fighting Racism in World
War II (New York: Monad Press, 1980); LeRoi Jones, Blues People, 175-207; Frank Kofsky, Black
Nationalism and the Revolution in Music (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 56, 271; Stuart Cos-
grove, "The Zoot-Suit and Style Warfare," History Workshop Journal 18 (Autumn 1984): 77-91.
4. James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York: Bantam Books, 1955), 93. Baldwin's powerful
account tends unfortunately to psychologize militant energies into an unchanging ghetto men-
tality.
5. The participant's quote and Clark's analysis are from Kenneth B. Clark and James Barker, "The
Zoot Effect in Personality: A Race Riot Participant," Journal of Abnormal Psychology 40.2 (1945): 143-
48. The article's place of publication indicates its perspective.
6. George Breitman, " 'Zoot Suit Riots' in Los Angeles," Militant, 19 June 1943 in Fighting Racism in
World War II, 255. In this connection see also Cosgrove, "The Zoot-Suit and Style Warfare," 85-
88.
7. Francis Newton [Eric Hobsbawm], The Jazz Scene (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1959), 213-22.
See also Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Methuen, 1979), 46-49.
8. "How Deaf Can You Get?" Time, 17 May 1948, 74.
9. The marxist subculture theory of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies is
set forth in Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, eds., Resistance Through Rituals (London: Hutchinson,
1976) and Hebdige, Subculture. I rely on it primarily to think about bebop's "magical" formal
solutions to some of the social contradictions outlined here. Cosgrove's "The Zoot-Suit and Style
Warfare" goes some important distance toward a reading of the subcultural dress of this period.
As far as I know, little writing since Baraka's Blues People has taken the music's social and political
meanings seriously. Two excellent articles that have shaped my thinking are Benj DeMott, "The
Future Is Unwritten: Working-Class Youth Cultures in England and America," Critical Texts 5.1
(1988): 42-56; and Hazel V. Carby, "It Jus Be's Dat Way Sometime: The Sexual Politics of Women's
Blues," Radical America 20.4 (1986): 9-22.
10. Review of Charlie Parker's "Billie's Bounce" and "Now's the Time," Down Beat, 22 April 1946, 15.
"Bird Gets the Worm," Bird/The Savoy Recordings (Savoy 2201); "Move," One Night in Birdland (Co-
lumbia 34808); "April in Paris," Thelonious Monk/Genius of Modern Music, Vol. 1 (Blue Note 81510).
11. I am indebted here to C. O'Brien's argument in regard to black pop in the sixties, "At Ease in
Azania," Critical Texts 5.1 (1988): 39-41.
12. Ralph Ellison, "The Golden Age, Time Past" in Shadow and Act (1964; New York: Vintage Books,
1972), 200-201. Quite apart from its engrossing meditation on the meaning of Minton's, Ellison's
essay can be read as a jazz counter-statement (conscious, I believe) to T. S. Eliot's idea of tradition.
"In [bebop] the steady flow of memory, desire and defined experience summed up by the tra-
ditional jazz beat and blues mood seemed swept like a great river from its old, deep bed. We know
better now, and recognize the old moods in the new sounds, but what we know is that which
was then becoming, . . . the best of it absorbed like drops of fully distilled technique, mood and
emotions into the great stream of jazz" (203). Jazz has rarely been treated with this degree of
moral seriousness.
13. Leonard Feather, Inside Jazz ([originally Inside Be-bop, 1949] New York: Da Capo Press, 1977), 15.
"Parker's Mood" can be found on Bird/The Savoy Recordings.
14. Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory (New York: Random House, 1986), 148-49; 152.
15. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove, 1966), 39-69. This was suggested to me by
Steve Chibnall, "Whistle and Zoot: The Changing Meaning of a Suit of Clothes," History Workshop
Journal 20 (Autumn 1985): 60-61. The pressures on those newly arrived are typified in Miles
Davis's remark that upon his arrival from East St. Louis he believed everyone in New York knew
more than he did. Davis's response was simply to dress like a fashion plate. See Ian Carr, Miles
Davis: A Biography (New York: Quill, 1984), 14.
604
CALLALOO
16. Quoted in Gary Giddins, Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker (New York: Morrow, 1987),
66.
17. Marshall W. Stearns, The Story of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 224-25.
18. I am influenced here by Franco Moretti's reading of Walter Benjamin's "On Some Motifs in Baude-
laire" in Signs Taken For Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David
Forgacs, and David Miller (London: Verso, 1983), 116-17. One measure of bebop's close attention
to its context is that it spoke largely to northern urban audiences. In the southwest, Charlie Parker
recalled, the music registered as a strange and meaningless noise; "in the middle west the colored
audiences liked it but the whites didn't"; and "in New York everyone liked it" (Feather 31).
19. David Toop, The Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip-Hop (Boston: South End Press, 1984), 18.
"Ornithology," the "national anthem of bop," was of course an appropriation of "How High the
Moon." The classic recording is Charlie Parker's on The Very Best of Bird (Warner Bros. 2WB 3198).
20. The Jazz Tradition, new and revised ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 152.
21. R&B, of course, gained supremacy with the expansion of capital in the sixties, resulting in the
exile of many jazz musicians to Europe; jazz lamely but gamely fought back with "fusion" in the
seventies, finally stabilizing itself in the currently profitable classicist mode, in whose purer forms
R&B has itself been exiled. There are signs, in performers as various as Ornette Coleman, Lester
Bowie, Arthur Blythe, Henry Threadgill, and younger Brooklyn players such as Steve Coleman,
Geri Allen, and Greg Osby, that the repressed is, healthily this time, returning.
22. Review of "Thelonious," Down Beat, 25 February 1948, 19.
23. "Bebop and After: A Report" in Nat Hentoff and Albert J. McCarthy, eds., Jazz (New York: Grove
Press, 1959), 291.
24. Down Beat, 16 December 1946, 12.
25. Horace R. Cayton, "Social Significance in Jazz Louses Good Stuff Up," Down Beat, 16 December
1946, 8.
26. Bill Gottlieb, "Dixieland Nowhere Says Dave Tough," Down Beat, 23 September 1946, 4.
27. For the music press as social control in the sixties, see Kofsky, Black Nationalism and the Revolution
in Music, 79-97. Leonard Feather's publisher changed the "cursed" name of Inside Be-bop for its
second edition to Inside Jazz, the name it still carries. See Feather's new introduction to the book.
28. "I can only report, very possibly because of some deeply-buried strain of black reaction in me,
that I have found this music uniformly thin, at once dilapidated and overblown, and exhibiting
a poverty of thematic development and a richness of affectation not only, apparently, intentional,
but enormously self-satisfied.... There has been nothing like this in the way of an overcons-
ciousness of stylistic idiosyncrasy, I should say, since the Gothic Revival." Weldon Kees, "Musk-
rat Ramble: Popular and Unpopular Music," Partisan Review 15.5 (1948): 621-22. The second sen-
tence is probably true and the first absolutely symptomatic.
29. Militant, 4 April 1942 and 7 August 1943 in James, Breitman, et al., Fighting Racism in World War
II, 158, 283. The best response to the CP aesthetic was Charlie Parker's. In 1952 (after he became
quite famous) Bird was hired to play a CP benefit for activist attorney and city council member
Benjamin Davis. During a break, as guest Paul Robeson sang a work song called "Water Boy,"
Bird trotted scandalously toward the stage with a glass of water. Giddins, Celebrating Bird, 113-
14.
30. Kerouac in 1940 did praise Lester Young in a Columbia school paper, for which he himself de-
serves praise, considering the context. (What might Prez's "hum and buzz of implication" have
seemed on Morningside Heights?) Later, however, the romance of the word combined with the
distance between cultures resulted in a kind of updated Van-Vechtenism. See Barry Gifford and
Lawrence Lee, Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978),
23. Thanks to Benj DeMott for his suggestions on the Beats.
605